On pandas

Aug. 6th, 2004 11:25 am
edg: (PANDA!)
[personal profile] edg
So what happened to the comma in this process? Well, between the 16th century and the present day, it became a kind of scary grammatical sheepdog. As we shall shortly see, the comma has so many jobs as a "separator" (punctuation marks are traditionally either "separators" or "terminators") that it tears about on the hillside of language, endlessly organizing words into sensible groups and making them stay put: sorting and dividing; circling and herding; and of course darting off with a peremptory "woof" to round up any wayward subordinate clause that makes a futile bolt for semantic freedom.

So the book itself isn't so bad after all.
This account has disabled anonymous posting.
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting

December 2015

S M T W T F S
  12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
27 28293031  

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 25th, 2025 01:13 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios